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Al-Ahram Weekly 26 Aug. - 1 Sep. 1999 Issue No. 444 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 26 Aug. - 1 Sep. 1999 Issue No. 444
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Focus Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Waiting for America
By Graham UsherIt appears that picking the locks presently obstructing movement in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations is again to be left to the true key-holders in the Middle East, that is, the Americans. Or so the Palestinian leadership hopes. PLO negotiators Mahmoud Abbas and Saeb Ereikat are in Washington today, ostensibly to prepare the ground for Secretary of State Madeleine Albright's visit to the region in September, but actually to prevail on her to "pressure" Israel to implement an agreement it has signed and her president has guaranteed. The hope may be forlorn.
In line with Ehud Barak's preferred low-key approach, State Department officials have already let it be known that Albright's trip is less to wrap up a deal on implementing the 1998 Wye agreement than to "assess" the present state of play of the Oslo process. The real weight of Albright's visit will be focused on hammering out a formula to enable Israeli-Syrian negotiations to resume "from the point they left off" in February 1996. The rationale for this hands-off attitude is that since Israel and the Palestinians are again making "progress" in the talks, there is no need for any active American involvement.
The progress cited involves two "in principle" agreements reached between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators on 23 August. The first is that the Palestinian Authority (PA) may commence construction of a seaport in Gaza in early October. Although this will create some much-needed jobs in the Strip, the Israeli "concession" here is more symbolic than real. According to Palestinian negotiator Abdel-Razek Yehya, the port will take three years to build, which "gives us enough time to work out remaining issues [to do with the functioning of the port] like security."
The other agreement, also slated for October, is the operation of a "southern" safe passage route for Palestinians from Gaza to the Hebron area in the West Bank. But if the deal here represents "progress," many Palestinians will be scratching their heads as to what is meant by a retreat.
The agreement on the southern route safe passage has been waiting to be signed for the last three years, but was held up over a dispute between the two sides over the exit point for the "northern" safe passage route. The Israelis wanted it to go from Gaza to Ramallah, in line with their vision of the Palestinian entity's final status borders. The Palestinians wanted it to terminate at Latrun, in line with theirs. The agreement reached on 23 August states that while the southern route may start in October, the northern route will not begin until January next year, a deferral which represents an Israeli victory and a Palestinian climb-down. Nor is it yet clear whether opening the safe passage will entail any easing of Israeli restrictions on Palestinian "free movement" which currently confines some 950,000 (out of a total one million) Palestinians to Gaza for want of the required Israeli "security" permits.
But whatever the content of these agreements, neither will see the light of day until, and unless, there is agreement on the two substantive disagreements over Wye -- the timetable for implementing the remaining 11 per cent redeployment and the number and kind of Palestinian prisoners to be released. The Palestinian position remains that if the redeployment is to begin on 1 October, as Israel has stated, then it must be completed by the end of November. The Israelis want the two outstanding phases of the redeployment to be stretched out until February 2000 and tied to a Palestinian-Israeli Declaration of Principles on Oslo's final status talks, a linkage that Yasser Arafat, so far, has refused.
But it is on the matter of prisoners that the Palestinian negotiators are most desirous of "progress." Of the many defects of Wye, it is its omission on the plight of the Palestinian prisoners still interned in Israeli jails that has most outraged Palestinian public opinion. This is because there was no written commitment in the agreement to release any prisoners, but only a verbal promise by Israel's former prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu to free 750 prisoners in three batches of 250 each. But when the first "batch" was released last November, 150 were criminals rather than bona fide political prisoners -- a selection Netanyahu justified since, according to his reading of Wye, it was Israel, and not the PA, who would decide which prisoners would be released and which would stay put in jail.
It is a reading Barak appears to share. The maximum number of political prisoners Israel is presently prepared to release is 250, since the rest have "Jewish blood on their hands" and/or are affiliated with the anti-Oslo Islamist and PLO opposition movements. The Palestinian negotiators are demanding that 650 prisoners be freed by the end of November and that all of them are political, rather than criminal, cases. There are strong domestic reasons for this demand.
Of the 2,500 political prisoners in Israeli jails, around 500 are serving sentences for resistance activities committed prior to the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993. Of these, about 200 belong to Arafat's Fatah movement. And it was on their behalf that Fatah activists took to the streets last autumn as much in anger at their own leadership as at their Israeli jailers. Should they be betrayed again, there are signs that similar protests could revive.
